Around seventh grade, my mom brought home an IBM computer that took five minutes to start. It originally had MS-DOS 3.0 installed, but over the years I upgraded. There was some castle adventure game for MS-DOS 4.0 that once again captured my full attention, just like "Return To Pirate’s Island" did. Only this time, I could actually move my aviator around in the room I was in, instead of the game being text-based only. I don’t believe I ever beat that game—probably something else for me to find on the Internet on the next snow day we have in Seattle.

I’ll never forget using my first mouse with this computer. I thought the mouse was the coolest thing ever. I also thought printing was cool, but the idea of a paper jam really concerned me, as I thought a paper jam could physically break the printer. Maybe it could have. It was around the time of getting the mouse and printer that I recall learning to study by typing my notes into the computer. Something about the act of typing helped me pay attention to my notes. And there was the added advantage of saving it to a disk, something I cherished from those TI programming days.

Around the same time, I got into Nintendo, just like every other kid on the block. When I beat my first game—"Metroid," a first-person adventure game—I frantically called up all my friends to let them know about the ending. I didn’t care that I had beat the game or that Samus, the main character in the game, was a woman. I simply had to share that "They rolled the closing credits, just like in a movie." My friends already knew that I was easily amused, so they weren’t surprised by my excitement over seeing the list of names of all the developers who had worked on the game.

The game that really sold me on computer programming—as in, "I want to create video games when I grow up, and no one is getting in my way"—was "Final Fantasy II," a role-playing game for Nintendo. "Final Fantasy II" was the first role-playing game (RPG) that exposed me to not only a story line but character development in a video game. It amazed me to watch these characters think out loud, debate their moral issues, and in some cases even die in the game, not to be brought back to the story line. In a sense, it was an interactive book, where the story line was written but you controlled the pace at which you read the story.

It was also my first RPG that introduced me to side quests, these little extra adventures you could go on that didn’t affect the overall outcome of the game. And thanks to the instruction booklet that came with it, I was determined to max out the strength and defenses of my characters, and to find that pink item to get the ultimate weapon.

I was so into this game that I logged nearly 99 hours on it. I wanted to see what would happen to the UI if I played for over 99 hours. Would it give me a special item? Would the UI just freeze at 99 hours? Unfortunately, a cousin wanted to play the game, and I wasn’t supervising when he decided which folder to save his newly created game in. Something inside my head snapped when I saw my beloved status showing less than an hour. I’ve never been able to quite get into RPGs again, although in my adult years, I was able to enjoy "Final Fantasy VII." But that enjoyment was probably because I was recovering from a motorcycle accident and I couldn’t do anything but play video games and watch TV.

Shortly after I beat "Final Fantasy II," around the seventieth hour mark, I got a smooth collie from the pound. I named him Cecil, after the main character in the game. He was the most loyal dog in the world to this only child, living up to his namesake in the game. He lived a very long life, 10+ years. Imagine a story line to a video game so intriguing to a kid that the creators got free advertisement for the game for 10 years, all in the name of a dog. I still to this day hear, "You named a dog Cecil?" I probably shouldn’t tell people that I’m debating calling my next smooth collie "Cecil 2."